Only man can stop being fully man. He can ascend above all degres of universal existence and by the same token fall below the level of the basest of creatures.
Seyyed Hossein NasrMany people have criticized Islam for being just automatic, having no individuality, just surrendering your will to God, but we Muslims know very well that every moment of the day we have to practice the fact that to surrender one's self to God is an act of free will.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr300 years after the rise of Islam there were Zoroastrians in Iran. The Muslim armies never forced people to accept Islam. It was only within Arabia that God ordered the idolaters to have a choice of either embracing Islam or fight against Muslims, because He wanted to remove this terrible idolatry that exited there. But outside Arabia where Islam met Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus, they were given a choice by and large. That's why many Christians and Jewish communities survived in the Muslim world, but gradually many of them embraced Islam for different reasons.
Seyyed Hossein NasrThe environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering.
Seyyed Hossein NasrOne of the greatest problems of humanity is how to live in a multi religious society without losing one's religion - without relativising everything.
Seyyed Hossein NasrWhat is tragic today is that there is a number of Muslims who think that all the solutions are to be found simply by external actions. They don't have to do anything within themselves. This is a deeply Western idea - modern, Western idea, where you try to improve the world without improving yourself. And this is what the Muslims who talk about others putting their heads in the sand and that "We are doing jihad and we are political" and so forth, they are emulating a very important mistake of modernism.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr